BORING BUT IMPORTANT NEW YEAR REMINDERS

There is nothing interesting here but some really important information that we want to make sure employers know for 2017.

New Jersey Employers

Minimum wage increase to $8.44 an hour

New NJDOL Wage and Hour mandatory posting

Also please do not forget the mandatory annual distribution of the Gender Equity Notice (and obtain the required signed acknowledgement from each employee) for employers with fifty or more employees, and the Conscientious Employee Protection Act notice for employers with ten or more employees (which does not require a signed acknowledgement but it cannot hurt).

New York Employers

Here is a surprise. Although a federal court in Texas enjoined the implementation of the changes to the federal overtime regulations, New York State has imposed its own similar changes to the salary thresholds for Exempt status that went into effect on January 1, 2017.

Just to make things interesting, those thresholds vary in three different areas of the state, there are two different scales for New York City based on the size of the employer and the thresholds increase annually three times for large New York City employers, four times for small New York City employers, six times for employers in Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester Counties (through 2021) and five times for the rest of the state (through 2020).

So for example, in order for an employer to maintain the overtime Exempt status of a management employee in New York City, at a large employer (11 or more employees), that employee must earn no less than $42,900 annually this year. Beginning December 31, 2017, that salary threshold increases to $50,700 and starting December 31, 2018, the salary cannot be less than $58,500. That same $58,500 threshold will also be reached for NYC small employers but a year later and in Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester in 2021. In the rest of the state, the threshold will top out at $48,750 in 2020.